Tag: minor leagues

lol Braves: Ryan Howard, really?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SMH: Braves sign Ryan Howard to minor league deal

I can only imagine the things the talking heads said to themselves/one another to justify thinking that this was a fantastic idea.

“This guy has killed us for years.  He’s hit 52 home runs against us.  We should get him!”

“This guy has killed the Nats/Mets/Marlins throughout his career.  We should get him!”

“This guy is a former rookie of the year, MVP and a World Series winner.  We should get him!”

None of those are wrong statements, but they’re mostly applicable to the first half of his career, before a torn ACL pretty much destroyed his career after 2011.  The reality of the situation is that since that injury, he’s been a shell of his former self, batting .226 and hitting an average of 19 home runs a season, which isn’t terrible, but this is also a guy that once clubbed 58 in 2006 and 284 in his first six full seasons, regularly putting the fear of god into opposing pitchers and fans of other teams.

In all honesty, this really isn’t a bad signing.  It’s a minor league deal, which basically means that Ryan Howard is basically getting a set minor league salary while he’s playing in the minor leagues trying to prove that he’s still capable of playing baseball, and if he gets called up to the majors, he’ll get a pro-rated major league minimum salary, minus any incentives worked into the contract.  It’s a very low risk, high reward deal for the Braves, and if they didn’t pull the trigger, undoubtedly someone else would have.

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Maybe fourth time will be a charm

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I don’t pay nearly as much attention to baseball as I once did, despite that we’re living in kind of the era of the immediate, where tweets, alerts, push notifications and other means of instant communication exist to stay on top of things very easily if one really wanted to, like baseball news.  Often times, I miss out on Braves news much less any news around baseball, because I simply am not that deeply involved like I once did, and everything that happened in the baseball landscape was something I wanted to know.

However, among the things that I regularly Googled and checked on from time to time, was one of the pitchers that I really, really enjoyed watching and was a fan of: Jonny Venters.  Long story short, he was once an unhittable relief pitcher on the Braves, utilizing a left-handed power sinker from another planet, and even achieved All-Star status for his immense talent.  But the injury bug struck, and he underwent the dreaded Tommy John elbow surgery, and eventually he was released by the Braves.  Didn’t matter where he went, I knew that I was going to root for Jonny, and so I always kind of kept an ear to the ground even when he was signed by the Rays, fully knowing that it was going to be some time before he was cleared to pitch again.

Last summer, things looked really optimistic, and Jonny Venters made his way into the minor leagues to work his way back up.  Personally, I was stoked to see him taking the mound again, and I grew excited at the prospect of him getting back into game shape, and then getting called up by the Rays, who would unleash the power sinker from the left side onto the mostly unsuspecting American League.

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This is why MiLB > MLB

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God I dislike the Phillies.  But damn if their Triple-A affiliates, the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, don’t have the most creative and socially active creative team in professional sports.  I not only have respect for their constantly moving and constantly producing creative, but I admittedly am a fan, even if they are a Phillies affiliate.  I have two Iron Pigs baseball caps; excluding promotional gate giveaways that I mostly collect and don’t wear, I can’t even say the same about the Atlanta Braves, for whom I only have a single baseball cap, that’s almost literally been worn to death and doesn’t quite fit right anymore either.

But anyway, I got an email from the Iron Pigs because I’m apparently on their mailing list because of the cap I purchased from them over the internet.  Usually I delete these emails instantaneously, and chide myself for not opening them, so I can go straight to the bottom and look for the unsubscribe button and then remind myself to unsubscribe the next time one comes in, to which the cycle repeats itself all over again.  However, the subject line was something that caught my attention and instantly piqued my interest: BACON VS. TACOS.

I like bacon.  I like tacos.  Never did I think that I’d ever have to pick a side between the two; after all, you can even combine them and get some good tacos with bacon out of them.  But apparently an ingenious promotion was birthed also involving the Fresno Grizzlies who have apparently re-branded themselves as the Fresno Tacos for some reason, but I am okay with that, because naming one’s self after food is always an entertaining idea in my opinion.

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The Gwinnett Braves have bad attendance?  YOU DON’T SAY

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About as easy to predict as rain in Florida – the Gwinnett Braves suffer average attendance drop for the fourth straight year

Sometimes I wonder at what point will people see beyond all the rah-rah rhetoric about how the Atlanta Braves and all their owned affiliates are good for economies, communities and are actually burdens and ballasts to towns that weren’t exactly unanimously ecstatic about their presences?  Will a player have to kill someone?  I mean, Braves players have been busted in various forms of domestic abuse, and nobody seems to sour on the organization.  The organization has fleeced pretty much every small town in which their minor league affiliates exist in, as well as the future home of the big club.  When will people realize that baseball isn’t just America’s Pasttime, but also a cold, calculated, greedy, money-grubbing business that often acts like a leech on the places they invade?

But anyway, about as sure as the sun rises in the morning, the Gwinnett Braves are struggling to draw people to their ballpark.  I mean, who would have thought a minor league ballpark that’s barely 60 miles away from the major league parent, with ticket costs equivalent to major league prices and has a staunch no-outside food policy unlike the parent, would suffer weak attendance numbers?  I mean, who wouldn’t want to see Sean Kazmar instead of Freddie Freeman, or whenever a superstar visiting player like Clayton Kershaw or Andrew McCutchen comes to Turner Field?

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Remembering Tommy Hanson

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In short: former Major League Baseball pitcher Thomas J. “Tommy” Hanson passes away at the age of 29, due to “catastrophic organ failure.”

Talk about something that came out of nowhere; it’s not often that I expect to hear about spontaneous deaths from people much younger than I am. And in spite of my faltering indifference to the game over the last few years, I’d like to write some words about Tommy Hanson, because if anything at all, he represents a player that was pretty prevalent during my peak of baseball fandom, and I’m genuinely sad to hear about his unfortunate and way too early departure.

Forget about the win-loss record, the ERA, and the list of teams that he had played for in his career, that one might expect to see within the final paragraphs of a professional athlete’s online eulogy and/or obituary. This isn’t to say that they weren’t pretty, quite the contrary, his overall numbers were positive and respectable, despite the obvious observation that he was declining quickly, mostly on account of shoulder troubles that plagued the tail end of his baseball career.

To me, Tommy Hanson represents the link, the gateway, into my eventual love and appreciation for minor league baseball.

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Photos: Frawley Stadium, Wilmington, Delaware

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Because I’m a baseball hipster that prefers minor league baseball over the majors, I had to capitalize on proximity, and take advantage of the fact that my friend and I would be passing Wilmington on the way back down to Virginia, and stopped for food and MiLB baseball, at Frawley Stadium, the A+ affiliates of the Kansas City Royals.

As the classic film Wayne’s World inquires what there is to do in Delaware, we at least found one decent thing to do in catching some minor league baseball at a pretty clean and comfortable ballpark.

Not that anyone but me would care, Frawley Stadium is one more park closer to achieving a smaller accolade than visiting all 30 MLB parks; which is seeing all of the stadiums in the Carolina League of minor league baseball.  With Wilmington now off the list of eight ballparks, that leaves just two more Carolina League parks to see for completion.

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Ballparks: Danville, Virginia

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It only took three years, but finally everything worked out as they should of, and I was able to make my long-awaited visit to sleepy Danville, Virginia, where I could get to see the Danville Braves rookie-level squad.

With Danville visited, I can now say that I’ve seen every single level of the Atlanta Braves minor league system, to which I am very pleased with.